Why Germany's Greens are known as the 'banning party'
A three-minute read
Four Things
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is continuing to cause tension on the streets of Germany. At three different demos against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza over the weekend protests descended into violence, with police arresting 59 people. As well as attacking officers with stones and bottles, protesters are once again reported to have shouted anti-Semitic paroles, leading to politicians and police calling for more surveillance of the pro-Palestinian scene.
Schleswig-Holstein, which has had the lowest rate of coronavirus infection throughout the winter and spring, opened back up for tourism on Monday. The north-western state now permits restaurants to open indoors as well as outside. Boat trips on the coast are also now back up and running. Neighbouring Meck-Pom is initially only opening its tourism branch for people who live in the state.
The latest figures from the RKI show 5,412 new infections reported over the past 24 hours. After falling under 100 on Friday, the nation 7-day incidence now stands at 83.1 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. If you missed our piece last week on the physicists who’ve been modelling the pandemic in Germany (with questionable accuracy), read it here.
The speed of vaccination over the past few weeks has eased much of the frustration people were feeling over the slow rollout in the late winter. 31 million people have now had their first jab and on Monday Health Minister Jens Spahn announced that prioritisation would be lifted altogether on June 7th, meaning anyone can book themselves in for a vaccination from that day onwards.
Electioneering has started
The most predictable debate of the campaign season is already underway. After Bild am Sonntag tried to trap Green leader Annalena Baerbock into pledging a ban on all short-haul flights should she become Chancellor, parties on the right have lined up to call the Greens the Verbotspartei.
“A ban on short-haul flights and massive price increases in air travel are the wrong approach,” responded CDU/CSU deputy faction leader Ulrich Lange. “We don’t want any micromanagement of daily life by Ms. Baerbock,” FDP faction leader Marco Buschmann chimed in.
The CDU and FDP’s reactions were fairly transparent campaign tactics. They are hoping for a repeat of 2013, when a Green pledge to introduce a Veggie Day in canteens lead to a collapse in their polling figures.
In fact, Baerbock at no point said she wanted to ban short haul flights.
What Baerbock told Bild is something that is already in the party’s draft manifesto - that they want to make short haul flights “obsolete” by the end of the decade by modernizing the rail network. Baerbock also said that she wanted to end the subsidies that make short-haul flights profitable.
These are both things that should hardly be controversial. Air travel is notoriously bad for the environment; and airlines aren’t subject to fuel tax on kerosene, meaning that it is still profitable for them to fly between Bonn and Berlin, or Munich and Berlin despite the fact that high-speed rail offers a similar door-to-door journey time.
But the Greens’ plan to make domestic flights obsolete in a decade still sound optimistic. Modernizing the rail network will be expensive and isn’t going to happen overnight. The high speed Berlin-Munich line that was opened at the end of 2017 took 25 years to plan and build.
Meanwhile there are other pragmatic concerns. As Die Zeit points out, 50 percent of Lufthansa’s domestic flights are connection services that bring travellers to hubs for long distance flights. Getting these people to travel by train would entail more complicated compensation procedures in the case of train delays while inevitably also entailing longer travel times.
Meanwhile, Die Welt criticizes the Greens for talking a big game at the federal level while local chapters of the party keep protesting new rail infrastructure projects. Stuttgart 21, which was meant to be part of a high-speed link through south-central Europe, has been held up for years partly due to nature protection protests. And the Fehmarn tunnel from Denmark that would take a significant amount of haulage off the roads and put it onto the tracks has also been resisted by Greens in the north.
J.L.